ABSTRACT
The National Curriculum makes history teaching mandatory on a profession which has had little experience of teaching it and with meagre resources at its disposal. In fact, history has been, and probably still is, the least taught subject in the primary school. The prescription and nature of the content of history teaching has also been critically received as detrimental to the first main purpose of school history. There is no doubt that ensuring history teaching reflects the multicultural nature of modern British society is one of the most intractable problems in schools today. History in the National Curriculum has to be taught within the context of cultural diversity. This poses significant challenges to the average primary teacher who is already overstretched with nine areas of the curriculum to cover and who, in addition, has to come to terms with teaching a subject he or she has largely ignored until.
